Binary in Binary for Secret Writing – A Cryptic’s Cousin Approach

Abstract

images, like cartoons, text documents, signatures captured by signing pads and/or 2-color images are very commonly used in our daily life. The JPEG compression method which was designed to efficiently compress color images do not do a good job on a monochromatic (binary) image. Changing the pixel values in these images for hiding the data, may produce a noticeable change in the cover media. Embedding capacity and preservation of visible artifacts are the potential problems of this technique. This paper proposes several methods for hiding data in binary images (including fax). The proposed algorithms alter pixels of the embeddable blocks of cover image depending on the characteristic values of the block. In addition, the new algorithm deals with statistical embedding for each block, which enhances the security of embedded data and the capacity of the embedding method. The performances of the algorithms are tested over various sizes of binary cover images by embedding various sizes of secured data. The effectiveness of the stego process proposed has been studied by estimating the number of errors, Bit error rate and Relative entropy.